Mel Slater: Virtual Body Ownership & Implications of the Metaverse
Kim Bullock, Faaizah Arshad, and Jessica Hagen speak with Mel Slater, a renowned and distinguished Investigator at the University of Barcelona who co-directs the Event Lab, in the Faculty of Psychology. They take a deep-dive into his study on body ownership and conversations with the self, benefits and drawbacks of XR, ways for emerging stakeholders to contribute to this field, and implications of the metaverse.
BIO
Mel Slater DSc, is a Distinguished Investigator at the University of Barcelona co-director of the Event Lab, in the Faculty of Psychology. He was Professor of Virtual Environments at University College London 1997-2018 in the Department of Computer Science. In 2005 he was awarded the Virtual Reality Career Award by IEEE Virtual Reality ‘In Recognition of Seminal Achievements in Engineering Virtual Reality’ and is a member of the IEEE Virtual Reality Academy. He is Field Editor of Frontiers in Robotics and AI, and Chief Editor of the Virtual Environments section. He received the A. v. Humboldt - J. C. Mutis Research Award in 2020. He is also co-Founder of Virtual Bodyworks S.L.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Kim Bullock
Welcome back to Psychiatry XR, where we aim to inspire worldwide conversations around the use of extended reality and psychiatric care. I'm your host for the episode, Kim Bullock and I'm joined by my co host Faaizah Arshad and Jessica Hagen. We are so so happy to have one of my idols, Dr. Mel Slater, as our guest on this podcast today. Mel Slater DSc, is a Distinguished Investigator at the University of Barcelona co-director of the Event Lab, in the Faculty of Psychology. He was Professor of Virtual Environments at University College London 1997-2018 in the Department of Computer Science. In 2005 he was awarded the Virtual Reality Career Award by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Virtual Reality ‘In Recognition of Seminal Achievements in Engineering Virtual Reality’ and is a member of the IEEE Virtual Reality Academy. He is Field Editor of Frontiers in Robotics and AI, and Chief Editor of the Virtual Environments section. He received the A. v. Humboldt - J. C. Mutis Research Award in 2020. He is also co-Founder of Virtual Bodyworks S.L, one of the most intriguing companies I’ve come across in the XR space. So Dr. Slater, thank you so much for joining us today.
Mel Slater
You're welcome. Thanks for inviting me.
Kim Bullock
I am very intrigued by your unique career as I'm sure listeners are an I became a diehard fan of yours because of your discoveries around the possibilities of changing implicit biases through embodied XR experiences, and especially by your seminal journal article in 2015, called “Conversations between self and self as Sigmund Freud—A virtual body ownership paradigm for self counseling”. And I've always wondered how you would describe yourself your career identity and your trajectory? Are you still a computer scientist at heart? Or do you see yourself within other disciplines, like social science and psychology and neuroscience? Or do you not identify as any of these labels. I just wonder about your career and how you see yourself fitting in different disciplines.
Mel Slater
I've had the kind of diverse career and it all made sense, when I started being involved in virtual reality. So my first degree was actually in statistics— mathematical statistics— but I learned a lot about experimental design, social sciences, and so on. Then I spent some time explicitly in social science studying sociology, and I moved back to statistics. And then I joined a Department of Computer Science and Statistics on the faculty at University of London. And gradually through that, I moved away from statistics into computer graphics, and computer graphics led me to virtual reality. And when I got involved in virtual reality, I then understood why I had studied experimental design and a bit of psychology and sociology, and so on. It all came together and made sense because though by that time, I was concentrating more on computer science, I had the background to be able to design experiments, analyze data, and so on, and the mix of computer science. In my lab, we carry out work on the technical side of virtual reality. But usually the end goal is to study some phenomenon in psychology or cognitive neuroscience. That's usually the end goal of our work.
Kim Bullock
Got it. Okay. Wow, didn't it sound like you would have never guessed, starting in statistics, you'd end up where you are. Do you have any advice for people in careers? Is it just a wayfaring? Just go for what's interesting to you, or how did that path unfold? Did you just do the next logical thing? Or did you do the thing that inspired you? Or how did you do this wayfaring
Mel Slater
Lots of it was accidental. I was mostly interested in mathematics and statistics, which is why I did my first degree in that. And then during the first degree, I become interested in applications in the social sciences. So it's why I then went to do a master's in sociology. And then I was thinking, well, sociology is great, but what am I going to really do with it? So I went back to statistics, but then that's how I ended up in a department. In those days actually, I don't know if it was the same in the United States, but often computer science and statistics were together, mainly because the statisticians used a lot of computing resources. And so I ended up in the computer science and statistics department. But then one day somebody else said to me, “We're doing this whole program of statistics and we want a computer program for statistics for people to use. Would you like to do the computer graphics part?” That's how I got involved in that. And then from there, it was a natural progression to virtual reality. And then the virtual reality is kind of multi dimensional. It's computer science. It's experimental design. It's psychology. It’s kind of everything that I'd studied rolled into one.
Kim Bullock
Yeah.
Mel Slater
So I never planned any of this. It just kind of happened.
Kim Bullock
Yeah, I hear that a lot. So kind of accidental opportunities that are in front of you. And yes, where are you are the right time. Wow, okay. Well, since this is trying to focus on psychiatric applications of XR, I'm wondering how you see your career and work fitting with the development of clinical XR if you do see it, fitting in there, and treating behavioral and mental health issues? So as a psychiatrist, doing mostly psychotherapy myself, I feel really intrigued by embodied perceptual illusions that have potential use in psychotherapy, and so much of works with patients, for a psychiatrist, and psychologist and mental health providers is employing traditional techniques that require a lot of explicit learning, and intention and effort on the client's parts. But we're always trying to do implicit kinds of learning on the fly in the relationship or having people do homework in between sessions and have experiences but these embodied experiences have the potential to allow a passive intervention that does actually allow this implicit learning with the consent of patients, of course. And do you see your work having clinical practice or any application to severe mental illness?
Mel Slater
Yes. So back in the 1990s, myself, and other people, of course, recognized that virtual reality could be a very good tool for psychological therapy. And kind of some of the early applications were things like fear of heights, fear of flying, this kind of thing. And it has logistic advantages in the sense that, if you imagine someone has a fear of public speaking, so the therapists would do like behavioral therapy with exposure therapy— they come in, they do a session, they have to go out into the real world and do some practicing, and come back the next week, and so on. And I and others realized, well, of course, you could do all that in the office, there is no real need, because I'd studied a lot that presents the illusion of being in the virtual, being in the place depicted by the virtual reality and responding to it as real. If you respond to it as real, then you'll have similar anxiety in virtual reality to a virtual audience as you do to a real audience. The very interesting thing is somebody with a real phobia of public speaking, you couldn't drag them with wild horses to go and speak in front of an audience, but they will speak in front of a virtual audience, and that nevertheless, gets sufficient anxiety. So in the 1990s, late 1990s, we started doing some studies relating to fear of public speaking, not therapy, but simply examining how people respond to virtual audiences. And we did, I think, three experiments where people had to give a talk in front of like a small seminar room, like in one of the studies, one audience was very negative, one was very positive, and other audiences very neutral. And we were quite amazed to find that even experienced speakers found it really hard to talk to the negative audience, and by negative, I mean, really negative, they never looked at the speaker, never looked at you, they kind of sitting with their hand on the head, reading a newspaper, walking out in the middle of the talk, this kind of thing. And experienced speakers found that really hard to deal with, even though they know they're just looking at some pixels on the screen. So it was a really powerful demonstration of the power of virtual reality in that regard. Then, in the early 2000s, I met Professor Daniel Freeman. At that time, it was the Institute of Psychiatry in London. And now he's at Oxford, again, in clinical psychology. And we started working together on paranoia, because we'd also noticed that when you're in virtual reality, and you interact with a virtual human character, people make up all kinds of stories about what's going on. They'll say things to you like, “Well, I was in there. And this character over here, he never looked at me. He really didn't like me.” And all this was in their head. Nothing was real about it. I mean, not only wasn't real because it's pixels on the screen, but also, there was nothing programmed, to not make them look at them. It was just in their imagination. And then I was telling this in UCL, University College London, to a professor of psychiatry, and he said, “Yeah, this would be very good to study paranoia.” And so, Daniel Freeman and I took that up, and we started doing studies— do people will get paranoid in virtual reality to the same level that they're paranoid in real life? And the answer was yes, again and again whenever we did it. And then Daniel did a big study in the local area where he was with 200 people from the local town. And he found that their degree of paranoia in the virtual reality was correlated with their paranoia measured before they ever went into the environment. So the more they had a tendency to paranoia in real life, the more they got paranoid, in virtual reality. And now that has moved into cognitive behavioral therapy, not to cure paranoia, but to allow people to function in the world. There's basically an exposure therapy, where they learn that they can go out safely, go to a cafe and order a drink, and this kind of thing, learn to do that in virtual reality. And then it maps over into real life behavior. So yeah, I've always been interested in the applications of virtual reality to clinical psychology. So then my real interest in virtual reality is that, yes, you can do things to simulate reality. So someone has a fear of heights, you can put them at the height, if someone has a fear of public speaking, you can put me in front of an audience. But my interest in virtual reality generally is always to go beyond, not just use it as a simulation of reality, which is important in many applications especially in training, but to go beyond what's possible in reality, and use it to positive advantage in that. And this is where I don't know how but just one day, I just came up with this idea of a self conversation. I was doing some reading. And I saw like, for example, in the United Kingdom, there's a long, long waiting time for people to get talking therapy, a long time. And also, during that time, people can get worse. And so, I was thinking is there some kind of way that people could start some level of therapy without waiting for the actual appointment with the clinician, but also something that would also help the clinician as well. So I came up with this idea, and I was working on this idea of embodiment. Embodiment means that when you're in virtual reality, we can program it, so you have a virtual body that visually substitutes your own. So when you look down at yourself in virtual reality, you don't see your real body, but you see a virtual body, that's life-sized, that moves the same as you do. And you can also show reflections of it in a mirror. So for other reasons, we were doing work on embodiment. And then I had this idea that suppose you could talk to a famous therapist, about your personal problem, and you explain your problem to the therapist. Then in the next phase, you are yourself in body as the therapist, and you see and hear yourself explaining the problem, because we could also do a scan of people and make a virtual body that really look like them. I'll tell you why Sigmund Freud in a minute. Wouldn't have been my choice, but it worked out to be. So I'm talking to Sigmund Freud. I explain a problem like my boss is treating me badly and it's making you feel really bad, or my partner's gone away, and I feel really lonely. And then I am Sigmund Freud, and I see and hear myself explain this problem. Now, one of the things we found in our research about embodiment is that the type of body you have influences attitudes, behaviors, cognition, and so on. So now embodied is I look in the mirror, I move close to the mirror, and I see not my body, but Sigmund Freud's body. I looke down and I see Sigmund Freud's body and across is me sitting, telling me a problem. And also, there is something well known in psychology called the Solomon paradox, that people are much better explaining a problem, solving a problem for a friend than they answer themselves. So when you have your own problem, you're stuck in your normal ways of thinking about it. And you can't get out of that. When a friend comes to you with a problem, you can often immediately see ways around it that they can't see because they're stuck in their normal way of thinking. So in this body swapping idea, when I embodied a Sigmund Freud, me, myself on the other side of the table is now the friend. So it's like the friend is explaining a problem to me. And now from my different perspective, and being embodied to Sigmund Freud, I might be able to come up with ideas that in my normal body I can't come up with because I just can't think outside the box. So that way I explain as Freud, I explain the problem. And then there's myself I see and hear Freud give a response to me in a disguised voice, so it doesn't sound like me anymore. And that way, I can keep switching back and forth between myself and Freud. Maintaining a conversation for however long I want. Why Freud? We wanted to do it because it was an experimental study. We wanted to choose someone that everyone would know without kind of a second thought. So beforehand, we did a survey amongst the population from which we would draw a sample with a question, “Who would you like to explain a personal problem to?” And number two was Angelina Jolie. And number one was Freud. So, we chose Freud. So this is what I mean by going outside of just simulation of reality, using virtual reality, for something it's really good for, which is something you can't do in reality. I mean, it's a bit like the empty chair technique from Gestalt therapy, where you imagine someone sitting in a chair, then you go and sit and you explain the problem to them? Well, you have an argument within, then you go and sit in the chair, but you know, you have to use your imaginal capabilities. Not everyone can do that. Here, you really see someone else. And you really are in that someone else's body and you see yourself. So we did that experiment. And we did another experiment, a few years later. And now there are three studies going on, one on helping people with obesity, one on helping people who are addicted to smoking, and another one on kind of general personal problems, including non-clinical depression. So we're kind of still working on this paradigm trying to apply it to other areas.
Jessica Hagen
What type of response have you heard from participants who have experienced that conversational therapy?
Mel Slater
Well, it was very positive. So in the first study we were interested in, does it matter if you have body ownership over Freud? And does it matter if it's Freud compared with someone else? We already knew this in advance. Just by talking about your problem, everyone improves, just by talking about it doesn't matter really what the context is. So what we wanted to know is, if you talk specifically to Freud, compared with someone else, does that make a difference? And secondly, when you are embodied as Freud, does it matter if you have the body ownership over the Freud body or not? And we found that in both of those cases, yes, it helps that you talk to Freud. And second, it helps if you have the feeling of body ownership over the Freud body. Then in the latest study, we wanted to know, does this body swap even matter? Is it enough just to talk to a simulated Freud? Who just answers you with canned answers? And again, we found that the body swapping really matters. Again, everyone improves but they improve more with relation to their personal problem, if they actually do the body swapping with Freud, rather than just talking to an animated Freud. So I'm waiting for results of the more recent study. I mean, they're still ongoing. So I don't know more than that yet. But when we interview people afterwards, the results are always, always positive.
Kim Bullock
Do you see any connections between this ability to change viewpoints kind of egocentric to the allocentric viewpoint as possibly related to theory of mind and neurodiversity issues? Because it does seem that some people may have deficits or strengths and weaknesses in their ability to take perspective taking and that maybe this could be sort of a prosthetic for those people that maybe don't have that ability? Or it can strengthen that in any or, yeah, any relations to theory of mind and neurodiversity issues?
Mel Slater
Yeah, so I think, you know, it's like the work we're doing on obesity. This is for the hospital you know, we're not directly dealing with patients ourselves. We're providing the software and the design and so on. But so the first point, why do we think it's useful to do this in virtual reality is because when we look in the mirror, we see what we expect to see. But when you see yourself in full 3D, and you can walk around yourself and see your body, it's really quite different. And years and years ago, when I was at University College, we did a kind of informal pilot with a doctor who was treating people with obesity. And all we did is we put them in the virtual reality with a scan of their actual body. So it was an accurate scan of their body. And many of them were shocked. They say, they'd never seen this before. They didn't know that they looked like that. They never realized how their body looks because one of the things with obesity is simply people who have obesity, recognizing the fact of how their body is, not their expectation of what it is when they see themselves in the mirror. So what they do in the hospital is they give people training for two days before the virtual reality experience. And the training is on a method of motivational interviewing. So they give them training on motivational interviewing beforehand, the time they get into the virtual reality. They already kind of have some experience about how to interview someone. And of course, the interesting thing is they're interviewing themselves. So I think that this kind of different embodied perspective taking could be useful, not just in the context of clinical work, but showing people there is another point of view. And that from a different embodied perspective, you can just realize things that you can't realize when you're in your normal way of thinking, though. Yeah, I think that's the interesting idea.
Faaizah Arshad
One thing that I'm curious to know is what you see as the long-term health benefits, whether that be behaviorally or what their mindset because you're facilitating that body swapping and their ability to have dialogue and also to problem solve.
Mel Slater
Yes, yeah, so we don't know yet. But the study in the hospital will address this issue, because there will be a longer term follow up. We, this is essential, obviously, in a study like that with actual patients. So in the studies we did, of course, one of the problem is in running a study in psychology department in university, is it's very difficult to do long term follow up, unless you've also got a lot of results that you can maintain the connections with people over time. And we never have enough results. But the study in the hospital is well funded. And I'm hoping we get some good results from that on the long term effects. So of course, this is a vital issue. So in other studies, we kind of follow up a week later, which isn't very long. But actually, in the last study that was published, we didn't ask people questions immediately after the virtual reality exposure. We asked them one week later, yeah. And they still had a very positive change, whether one week and one day, I don't know, but at least one week.
Faaizah Arshad
I think that's really fascinating because if you can sort of use this as a way to give subjects homework, or you know, an idea of how they can practice it at home, then it potentially can affect their long term ability to have just those dialogues with themselves without maybe needing virtual reality, although, of course, virtually is, it's a great way to facilitate that.
Mel Slater
Yes, it actually is what I was saying, in the beginning, I never came back to it, which was that one of the ideas of this would be for people to use it under some kind of guidance in between actual sessions, but also, before the session start. And of course, everything can be recorded everything, the movements of the person, their voice, the questions. And so this could be of interesting to clinicians, before they meet the patient can play back some of the things that the patient was talking about with themselves. There's one of the advantages of doing this kind of thing in virtual reality is that if you want it's never lost, the dialogues can be kept forever. So yeah, I think that's the important point.
Kim Bullock
What are you most excited about that you're working on or in the realm of XR?
Mel Slater
Yes. So I'm very interested to carry on this paradigm of the body swapping, because a lot of our fundamental research has been to do with embodiment, and its effects. And I'm particularly interested in using it for helping behavior. So we did a study in a United States Police Department, where we address the problem of racial violence and police against African Americans. We actually did this study in the police department, which is really interesting. And we use the embodiment paradigm to do that. And I'm very interested. We also did here in Barcelona, the same paradigm for sexual harassment of men against women. And both of these examples of this paradigm, the embodiment paradigm worked. So I'd like to kind of expand that and go to different areas of application. But basically, it's a way to improve helping behavior.
Kim Bullock
Compassion training and theory of mind ideas come into this.
Mel Slater
Yeah. Yeah, sure that paradigm is, so it take the police example. So in the virtual reality, you're told by your sergeant or whoever, that there's been a robbery and there's two suspects, one happens to be Black, one is White. You go in with another partner, and interview the one of them who happens to be the Black one. And your partner is virtual. And he becomes really aggressive, almost to the point of violence with a suspect. So that's the first round, you're together with this virtual policeman who occasionally turns to you and asks you if you want to ask a question. And he does a kind of very violent interview with a suspect. That's phase one. In phase two, you are the suspect, and you just re-experience everything that happened. As I said before, everything that you do is recorded. So we play back everything that happens, but now you're embodied as suspect, and you not only see this violent, virtual policeman attacking you, but you see what your own response was. Which is basically to acquiesce in it and to do nothing. That's one condition of the experiment. The other condition is everything is the same, that you see the interview from outside, you look through a window, you're not embodied or anything like that. You just see all from the outside. Then a few weeks later, we bring them back. And they go into a virtual cafe, and African American men, and you're with that violent police partner, who's just having a small talk with him, like, did you go to the game last night, and all this kind of stuff. And then an African American man walks in, and immediately your violent partner starts attacking him to the point of even pulling out a gun, accusing him of wanting to steal a woman's handbag, and all kinds of things like that. So our question was, would you intervene, depending on what experience you'd had a few weeks earlier. And what we found is that those who had been embodied in as the victim were far more likely to intervene in the cafe scenario than those who just saw everything from the outside from looking through a window into the interrogation room. That was the one with the police, it worked really well. And then we did a similar thing, very similar paradigm, almost the same with sexual harassment. With a group of guys, they're attacking a woman. And then you are the woman or you see it from a third person perspective. Then a week later, you have an experience, where you see men again, attacking a woman, and do you intervene or not. You do if previously you’d experienced being the woman? So I'm very interested to follow up on this paradigm in other areas of application? Not exactly psychiatry, but it's kind of related.
Kim Bullock
Oh, definitely. I've heard the term Proteus effect. Would you say that’s part of that construct?
Mel Slater
Well, the Proteus effect is the type of body I inhabit can affect my behaviors. This? Yeah, of course, it includes that because some embodied as a police officer, well, they are police officers, really were police officers. In this one, it's not so much the embodiment, but then they're embodied as the victim. So it's not so much the embodiment though that's important, the embodied perspective, from two different viewpoints— yours as a policeman, and as the suspect— what's more important is the whole situation. The thing I really liked about this is that, of course, there's police and other people, they have all kinds of trainings, and they go to lectures, and they learn, it's very bad, and they told us wrong, and so on. But here, we don't tell them anything we don't tell them it’s bad to be aggressive. They just have an experience. And the experience changes them in some way. There's no lecturing or telling them what they should think or shouldn't think it's just based on experience.
Kim Bullock
Implicit, implicit learning.
Mel Slater
Yes, exactly.
Kim Bullock
Got it. Okay.
Faaizah Arshad
think it's amazing that you can put together these ethical scenarios and like law enforcement scenarios that might be impossible to create that experience in real life for the subjects. But being able to do that in virtual reality. And I, you know, you talked about that in the beginning, but I think this like paradigm does exemplify how you can do that and put together these problems that teach subjects, something so important about morality, and ethicality, you know, empathy and important topics like.
Mel Slater
Yeah. And also in real life, you'd have to hire actors, which is expensive. And then they have to do exactly the same for everyone, which is impossible, and they get tired. They have to stop to eat and everything. The virtual characters, they do anything. Don't have to pay them.
Kim Bullock
Yeah, that's odd.
Jessica Hagen
Yeah, you can actually include the participant being the victim as well.
Mel Slater
Yes. Yeah.
Kim Bullock
I love this. Yeah. And also, you're developing that through this diverse VR platform for organizations right to help with implicit.
Mel Slater
Yeah, that's the spin off.
Kim Bullock
Yeah. I think that's phenomenal. Yeah, yeah. Well, what do you see is the future in XR, in 20 to 50 years. Do you see some things you're really excited about? Are there any dangers you're concerned about in the development or?
Mel Slater
Yeah, so I'll talk about the dangers. First, there's lots of talk about ethical issues related to virtual reality. Like, do you confuse reality with virtual reality? What's the long term effect? Can you use these techniques to make people biased in a negative way, rather than changing their bias, this could be more prosocial. There's many many, but the problem is, is that most of that is based on speculation, including a couple of papers I've been involved in, and there's no real data. So we have got a project from the Spanish Ministry of Science, which is explicitly designed to actually test empirically whether some of these dangers exist. Like do people get confused between what happens in both reality and reality, take things they've learned from virtual reality, negative things, take them over into real life and so on. Like, if you've had a negative conversation with a virtual representation of someone, you know, when you see the real person does that carry over, and then you can't help but think bad things about them. That's on the negative side. Basically, there's a lot of talk, but not very much data. Then in long term, I don't know about very long term, but one of the most exciting things, actually, during the lockdown, I had a Magic Leap device, which is augmented reality, and I started programming it to do some augmented reality. And what I found was really interesting that I managed to create an environment, which scared me more than anything ever had in virtual reality, even though in virtual reality, I could do the same. I mean, it's something very simple, they relied on something that Magic Leap software already provided, which was that you see an elephant and it kind of goes up on its hind legs, and does roaring, you know, making the sounds like elephant make. And I've seen this kind of thing in virtual reality. It’s a bit scary. But when the elephant was in my living room, which happens in in augmented reality, it was a whole different level. Somehow my brain doesn't, it sees this thing in my living room, it knows my living room is really there. And the effect it had on me was far more profound than anything I've ever experienced in virtual reality.
Kim Bullock
Wow
Mel Slater
So I'm looking forward to developments in augmented reality where I mean, the problem with devices today is the field of view is very narrow. It's not bright enough, you can't use it very well to obscure things in the real world. But that's all being developed. I'm very looking forward to explore the capabilities of augmented reality, and kind of much of the same philosophy I have of virtual reality to do things that you can't really do in reality, but you could do them in augmented reality. This is what excites me for the future once I have access to devices, which are good enough to do that. Well, I'm looking forward to the Apple device, a lot of talk about it, but it's always coming next month, you know?
Kim Bullock
Oh, yeah. Do you know what it's called? When it's supposed to be out?
Mel Slater
The software was going to be called OS or OS Real, I can't remember.
Kim Bullock
Okay.
Mel Slater
The hardware, I don't know. There's only ever rumors about it.
Kim Bullock
Yeah.
Mel Slater
We know. They've been working on it for many, many years with like, hundreds of people.
Kim Bullock
Yeah. Wow.
Mel Slater
I'm looking forward to it.
Kim Bullock
Yeah. Well, yeah. Are there any ethical concerns that you have about the development? Anything that we should be careful of.
Mel Slater
Yeah, yes. Oh, so about the metaverse. I think everybody knows this. In the metaverse, it doesn't really exist in any real sense today, but imagine it did. We carry on a large part of our daily lives in the metaverse, this could be great and release a lot of creativity, allow you to do things that you can't do very easily in real life, like have spaces where you meet people who are 1000s of kilometers away and visit your psychotherapist, do shopping, etc, etc. All inside this virtual reality. Of course we don't know the long term effects of wearing head mounted displays for many hours a day. But let's imagine that's all okay. So one of the things which is essential in virtual reality is head tracking, and body movements. Not only that, but of course, new devices are coming online immediately, which do eye tracking, facial expression tracking, it's really easy, and it's going to happen, there'll be monitoring your skin conductance and your heart rate, and maybe blood pressure and respiration. You know, in a few years, one device will encapsulate all of these things. You know, when I, when the device detects I've turned my head, it has to update the scene so that I'm looking for the right display. And knowing my heart rate may be useful for all kinds of applications of biofeedback or neurofeedback or whatever. All this is really good. But imagine the data is kept by someone else, who now knows what you were looking at, knows your responses, and also not just you but millions of other people, and then applying machine learning to this to make predictive models about how you individually and how people on the mass are going to respond to certain stimuli. Well, this is fantastic for advertisers. It's also probably fantastic for political manipulators, and so on. So we've seen what happens with social media. So imagine that multiplied by 100 because it's really different to looking at a few images on the screen in a few videos and some text than it is to be in there and actually be doing this and have this huge multi sensory data about every aspect of what you're doing plus knowing the stimuli that were associated with that data. So this really has to be taken on board. I know, the companies like Meta and so on, they're considering this, but it's a question whether commercial interests can be outweighed by ethical interest. And I imagine there'll have to be some kind of regulatory framework for this because this data is really valuable.
Kim Bullock
Yeah, sounds like our society and our policymaking. There'll be different groups that need to make these kinds of decisions.
Mel Slater
Yeah, well, it's like the historian, Yuval Harari. He was saying in this kind of system— I mean, he wasn't explicitly talking about the metaverse, he was just talking about having your phone around you everyday life— for the first time in history. it's possible for authorities to know everything you're doing. So imagine you living in the metaverse, that can know everything you're doing. And this is a means of manipulation control, far more than there was in the novel 1984. So that this kind of thing we have to watch out for. I know that the companies that are being responsible, and they want to ensure that this kind of thing doesn't happen. Yes, yes, it's here. And we live in a kind of society where money matters.
Kim Bullock
Yes.
Faaizah Arshad
Dr. Slater, I'd love to hear just speaking on like your thoughts about the future of XR, how you think young people like me can make an impactful change in the XR industry moving forward? Where do you think are key places, aspects of extended reality that are important to address and get involved in?
Mel Slater
Well, actually, I don't know an answer to that. But I know what kind of methodology that's not the right word. But let me explain what I mean. So people like me, virtual reality I started using in the 1990s. And for me, it's still new, even though I've been doing it all these years, it's still new. For people like you who grow up with it, nothing’s special. Like my daughter, who's 14, to her, it is like, oh, yeah, okay, I'll go into virtual reality and try this. It's not like a big deal. And because it's something that will always have been with you, and maybe not exactly the generation now, maybe in a few years time, who will grow up with the metaverse and this kind of thing, it won't be anything special. And therefore they will have ideas that we can't have, because we just haven't experienced it that way. So what I suspect is that people like yourself, and especially a bit later, who really do grow up with virtual and augmented reality as just a normal part of their lives like cell phones are today, they will have ideas we'll never have because we've never been exposed. We've never had that history. So this is going to be really interesting. And I hope you come up with really novel ideas that I would never have. Because I kind of for me, it's all still new, even though I've been doing it a long time.
Faaizah Arshad
I think that's what makes the breakthrough ao exciting is that there's just constant evolution, because at every time in its existence of extended reality, everyone just has ideas about ways that it can be applied.
Mel Slater
Yeah, to me, it's, it's really amazing. Because if I just think a few years ago, we had to have a lab with fixed installed devices, the lab itself cost in the order of $50,000, and so on. And now I'm just holding up a Meta Quest 2, and it's cheaper than a smartphone. And I can do better things I can with this than I ever could with really expensive devices and lab that we had just a few years ago. So it will become I think just like the cell phone really diffuse through society. But this is why we have to think very carefully about the effect it might have. Because no one ever realized that having cell phones can lead to distortion of the outcome of an election or lead to people becoming violent and this kind of thing, you know?
Kim Bullock
Yeah.
Jessica Hagen
Yeah, there's definitely a benefit to having multiple generations exploring this technology, because you can see what has been done with other technology in the past that we've learned from and the newcomers that are exploring what to do with it, they can take all of that knowledge that the rest of us have learned and really utilize it in a way that's going to be beneficial for everyone, not necessarily detrimental.
Mel Slater
Yeah, absolutely. Another area of very great interest is, not something I'm working on directly, but it's something that will be of interest, and how this feeds into entertainment, beyond games. What will be the equivalent of the movie in a few years time in virtual reality. In a normal movie, we're just passive witnesses. But what happens to make use of virtual reality. Somehow you have to be in it yet nevertheless, someone's trying to tell the story. So you can't do an action that then changes the whole story. Or maybe you can, though the application in the equivalent of movie making is going to be really interesting to see what kind of ideas people come up with.
Kim Bullock
New ways of storytelling.
Faaizah Arshad
I agree.
Jessica Hagen
Absolutely.
Kim Bullock
Great. Well, anything else you'd like to share with our listeners today?
Mel Slater
No, it's been a pleasure talking with you.
Faaizah Arshad
Yeah, likewise.
Kim Bullock
Yeah, this has been so wonderful. I think we could talk for hours.
Jessica Hagen
Absolutely.
Faaizah Arshad
Thank you.
Kim Bullock
Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing.
Mel Slater
You're welcome.
Kim Bullock
Yeah, a very valuable insight and one of the legacies in the field and founders on what's happening in XR, and thank you again for your time. We so appreciate it. And so that's it for episode of Psychiatry XR, and we hope you gained a new perspective on the use of extended reality and health care and thank you for listening. This episode was brought to you by Psychiatry XR, the psychiatry podcast about immersive technology and mental health. And for more information about Psychiatry XR, please visit our website at psychiatryxr.com. And be sure to subscribe to the podcast and tune in again next month to hear from another guest about XR’s use in psychiatric care. And you can join us monthly on Apple Podcast, Twitter, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast and Psychiatry XR was produced by Dr. Kim Bullock, Faaizah Arshad and Jessica Hagen. And please note that the podcast is distinct from Dr. Bullock's clinical teaching and research roles at Stanford University. The information provided is not medical advice and should not be considered or taken as replacement for medical advice. This episode was edited by David Bell and music and audio was produced by Austin Hagen. See you next time.